It is not often we are inspired by another companies website.

We have started to use the free website advertising network cahoola.com, and are seeing a steady stream of traffic from the ads.

It takes less than five minutes to create an account.  Then you simply paste their ad code into your webpages.  This code then shows visitors adverts, in exactly the same way as Google adsense does.

The great thing is that you can place their ad code on any site or blog.   So we placed it on several blogs and site we own, and the clicks from those different sources are earning us dozens of click credits each day.

So it is like adsense and adwords rolled into one.  But rather than taking your adsense earnings and spending them on adwords, you earn clicks and can then allocate them to your ad campaigns so spend…all from in one easy to use account!

Our top tip is to make sure that you add the maximum of three ad boxes on every webpage you can.  They have instructions on adding their code to blogger.com, phpbb, drupal, joomla, squarespace, wordpress (self hosted) and many more.  So use many sites to get people seeing the ads and clicking on them.    If you set it up well enough you will earn a constant supply of credits, which means your own ad campaigns will run forever, hands-off and completely free!

Highly recommended for anyone who would like to drive free website traffic.  Its free website promotion and traffic – YOU CANNOT LOSE!

It is official, Google’s “Caffeine” algo-update is coming very soon.  Described by Google as “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” Caffeine will be the largest update for several years.

According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Caffeine will be “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Sounds serious…

You may or may not know that Google has been soliciting feedback from the online community for months now, by making their Caffeine update publically available at http://www2.sandbox.google.com. However, that URL now just displays a “thank you” message.

So if you already know via checking that your site will take a nasty SERP fall, or you are unaware of how your site will react to Caffeine, then now is the time to take action and educate yourself, rather than leaving yourself open to a nasty traffic drop as a New Year present.

If you employ an SEO company, and have not heard from them about Caffeine already,  phone them and ask them what impact Caffeine may have. If they cannot tell you then I would recommend making a new years resolution to find a new SEO company!

Matt Cutt’s has now confirmed that the Caffeine update will go live “after the holidays” (not particularly clear terminology for those of of use living outside the USA, but hey Google has always been bizarrely global in audience, while at the same time failing to educate it’s spokespeople to talk in a non-USA-centric manner).

“The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

Remember the film Clue?  Based on the game Cluedo if you live in the UK, it was a classic whodunnit in a country mansion. There were several endings, and in each one Tim Curry said “Communism was just a ‘red’ herring….”.

In terms of linkbuilding, you can now use this phrase when talking about the near-dogma of  building only relevant links:

“Link relevancy was just a red herring….”

Google, especially Mr Cutts are happy to bang the drum about relevancy, as are many in the SEO community.  But ask the simple question “how is link relevancy evaluated”, and everyone looks at their cyber-feet and shuffles off to write another blog post.

For my sins I am a miniature wargamer.  I am into “historicals”, ie,  real wars and history such as the WW2. I view Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons as almost a different hobby, and for most historical wargamers it has no relevance whatsoever.

So does Google understand that vital distinction within what an outsider views as a single hobby?  How can they understand that although a gaming site might link out to sites in all those genres, to each of those groups the other links are completely irrelevant? Of course Google can’t, and that is why relevancy is nonsense.  How can Google make arbitrary decisions about the weight of links when relevancy is a very individual thing.

Of course there are obvious ones like a David Beckham blog linking to a football boot manufacturer, but how can it give more weight for some links as relevant but ignore others that are just as relevant or not because it simply cannot determine that relevancy.

We are lead to believe that Google determines relevancy through associations as well as through keywords and text relevancy.  This conjures up an image of the Googlebot poring over the newspapers everyday and understanding that names within the same text are actually associated and relevant to each other.  It is of course all possible in this day and age, but is that how it really is?  Or is it a red herring to make us comply?

Fear is Google’s friend, and the SEO industry by and large stokes the same fire, making joe public scared that their website will plunge into an abyss should they dare to have one more instance of their keyword on-page, or from getting a link from someone they are not sure about.  It is of course mostly nonsense, but it feeds the fear that keeps people in line.

If you parallel it with how religion was used to control the masses throught history, with the threat of eternal damnation for not following a set of rules that nobody understood and that changed all the time, then you will understand more about the  tactics Google is employing.

What clinched it for me in the relevancy debate, apart from the evidence of our own test sites, was this comment from Rand Fiskin of SEOMOZ.org on 2nd October, in their company blog:

“To be totally honest, I don’t think the content relationship (relevancy) or matching subject matter has much of an impact in the algo right now. Off-topic links, so long as they’re from powerful, trustworthy sources, seem to help just as much as those with topical matches.

It may seem weird, but I know I’m far from the only SEO to have observed this phenomenon…..”

So the message it appears is clear, and even the experts are saying it now.

Relevancy is a red herring.

Build good quality links, and lots of them.  If they happen to be relevant as well then whoopee-do, but never, ever pass up a good inbound link because it’s not relevant.